The increased public utilities fees in a labor camp in the village of
Kuplin (the Pruzhany district) brought prisoners to the brink of
survival.

Each prisoner has to pay 340,000 rubles a month for
a 3-bed room of 12 square metres with rusty cold water, slightly warm
radiators and no hot water. The room cost 160,000 rubles last month and
40,000 rubles in November, Radio Racyja reports.

“Inmates work at a collective farm and earn
500,000-700,000 rubles per month. Besides public utility fees, a lot of
prisoners have to pay alimonies and other payments. 340,000 is survival
limit for the inmates,” political prisoner Pavel Sevyarynets
says. “They are even beyond the survival limit. They have no money left
to buy food. What’s now? Starve or steal? It’s a mockery. Our
penitentiary system today is a holdover of Stalin’s times. It is a
Soviet punitive system. People cannot be improved or encouraged for a
normal life here. People suffer and wish for the end of their sentence
to get out of here and live as normal people live.”

As Pavel Sevyarynets thinks, they don’t see a way of living they could strive for.